The intravenous (“IV”) infusion of medical fluids into patients is used in the treatment of many different diseases. Depending on the physician, the fluids are delivered to the patient by means of a surgically inserted, main-line catheter or at a peripheral site, such as the patient's arm or leg. Often, due to the patient's condition, it is critical that the prescribed medication dose be administered at the prescribed rates during the designated period of time.
Infusion pumps are often used to administer medications to a patient. The administration may be conducted in small discrete doses or may be given at an essentially continuous rate. Infusion pump therapy may be electronically controlled to deliver precise, metered doses at exactly determined levels, thereby providing a beneficial gradual infusion of medication to the patient. In this manner, the infusion pump is able to mimic the natural process whereby chemical balances are maintained precisely by operating on a continuous time basis.
Many drugs that can be administered by infusion pump and by other means have minimum doses, below which they may not be effective and maximum doses, above which patient harm could result. In many cases, the level of minimum dose and maximum dose depends upon the “Profile,” that is, where the drug is used. For instance, a neonatal profile often has a much lower maximum dose of a drug than an ICU profile. Maximum and minimum doses, as well as many other drug administration parameters, are generated by the healthcare facility. These are data sets pertaining to the administration of drugs; i.e., drug data sets. It can be useful to a healthcare facility to compare the data set it uses for its drugs to data sets of other healthcare facilities to determine if it is comparable or if there are notable differences.
Modern infusion pumps and medication delivery systems include processors and memory and are capable of analyzing incoming or inputted values of operational parameters to determine if they are within the ranges of parameters stored in the above described data sets. Thus, each pump analyzes incoming infusion data and can alert a care giver where one or more of the incoming parameters falls outside of the hospital's or institution's accepted ranges for the parameter.
In setting up a hospital's drug administration data sets, pharmacy consultants analyze the hospital's drug data set for clinical appropriateness to determine whether the use of a particular drug in a hospital falls within recognized usage of the drug. For example, the consultant attempts to determine whether a drug is being used within a dosage range recognized as a best dosage range of the drug, and will identify situations where inappropriate dose ranges are being used for a particular type of patient.
This analysis is usually performed by comparing the healthcare facility's data set against a large printout of the compiled data sets of other healthcare facilities. This analysis usually takes about 4 to 5 hours, and is very tedious and prone to error. Hence those skilled in the art have recognized a need for a system and method that accomplishes the objectives of data set comparison on a faster and more accurate basis. The invention fulfills this need and others.